“It was just really beaming light or could have had a big reflection and was several thousand feet above us going opposite direction.”

The recorded interaction between pilots and air traffic controllers, first released to The Warzone, has since been the subject of quite a bit of speculation, as experts and enthusiasts alike attempt to make sense of the unidentified object spotted by more than one seasoned pilot. Explanations ranging from weather balloons to alien spaceships have been floated, but even Green, who saw the strange craft for himself, doesn’t quite know what to make of it.

Green, who was once tasked with piloting America’s heavy payload, supersonic Lancer bomber that has made headlines in recent months as one of the primary aircraft employed in America’s show of force exercises on the Korean peninsula, only knows one thing for sure: it didn’t look like any airplane he’s ever seen.

Albuquerque Center asked us if we could look and just be on the lookout and see if we see anything, and I’m like ‘okay’.” Green said in an interview with local TV affiliate KRBC.

“So, sure enough, I was looking out the windscreen because I wanted to see if it was there and yeah, I did. I saw it. It was very bright, but it wasn’t so bright you couldn’t look at it. You almost really wanted to look at it, to try to figure out what it was. It didn’t look anything like an airplane.”

Green, who has over twenty years experience in the cockpit of civilian and military aircraft claimed that he had never seen anything like the craft that flew overhead.

What was weird about it, normally, if you have an object and the sun is shining this way, the reflection would be on this side, but this was bright all the way around. It was so bright that you really couldn’t make out what shape it was,” he explained.

“I wasn’t scared at all, I was just really fascinated by it. Just trying to figure out what it was because it was so out of the ordinary.”

The pilot of the Learjet that first reported the incident to air traffic controllers has not yet been identified, but Bob Tracey, vice president of Phoenix Air Group, Inc. that chartered the flight and received a debriefing from the pilot, claims the pilot also reported that the strange craft was extremely bright.

Like you woke up in the morning and stared at a bright light,” Tracey said. “He said that it passed him at maybe a similar speed that an airliner would.”

That speed could potentially eliminate theories that that what the pilots saw was a high altitude weather balloon, as it would be limited to achieving wind speeds, which rarely reach that velocity even at that altitude.

Image courtesy of Pixabay